While “convergence” of television (TV) and computer technology have been a major focus of innovation and commercial development since the early 1990s, particularly in the area of “interactive television” (ITV), there remains a huge gulf in the nature of the user experience of ITV and of computer-based media such as the World Wide Web. Convergence has taken hold in infrastructure technologies, with digital and computer-based TV (DTV) editing, production, distribution, transmission, and devices. At heart ITV is a matter of hypermedia browsing, the process of browsing linked media resources like the Web, differing only on its emphasis on video as the central medium.
However, there remains a divide relating to the dramatic difference in how TV-centric and computer-centric media are used, and to the cultural divide between the TV production and distribution industry and the computer and Web industries that has prevented a convergence in user experience from developing or even being seen as possible and desirable. TV usage and directions are focused on its character as a lean-back, across-the-room, low resolution, and relatively passive, relaxed experience of couch potatoes viewing large, often shared TV screens with simple remote controls. PC usage and directions are focused on its character as lean-forward, up-close, high resolution, and intensive, highly interactive experiences of individuals with PC-styles displays, keyboards, and pointing devices. Variant device sets and applications, such as PDAs, tablets, and video games, could be taken as suggestive of the desirability of selecting among alternative usage modes and form factors, but only very limited aspects of these suggestions have been recognized.
The limitations of these radically disparate device set form factors have severely limited the appeal of ITV. ITV promises to greatly enrich the TV experience by allowing interactive features that can range from access to supplementary enhancement material such as background on programs, casts and players, sports statistics, polls, chat messaging, and interactive advertisements and purchase offers (“t-commerce”), and all manner of other tangential information, to ways to vary the core program content by acting on viewer input and choices as to camera angles or even alternative plots, as well as providing improved control of the core experience with electronic program guides (EPGs), personal video recorders (PVRs) and video on demand (VOD) and similar features.
The problem is that these interactive features are not well served by the TV usage mode and faun factor, and their use interferes with the basic TV experience. Rich interaction with a TV is inherently difficult. Presentation of information is limited by the poor capabilities of a TV screen for presenting text, menus, and navigations controls, and the crude input, capabilities of a remote control. The rich information and navigation functionality available on a Web browser or other PC-based user interface (e.g., UI, especially graphical user interfaces, GUIs) must be “dumbed-down” and limited for use on a TV, and even use of high-definition TV (HDTV) may not significantly ease that people do not like to read or do fine work from across-the-room, it is just not comfortable ergonomics. Furthermore, the attempt to show interactive controls and enhancements on the TV interferes with viewing by the person interacting, as well as any other viewers in the room. Compounding these issues and slowing recognition of better solutions is the dominance of the cable TV industry, its struggles in developing and deploying the advanced set-top boxes (STBs) needed to offer meaningful ITV services of the form it envisions, and its orientation to closed, proprietary systems that do not fully exploit or adapt to advances in the PC and Internet world.
The computer community has attempted to market PCs that include a TV tuner to support TV function in a PC-centric model, as promoted by the PC-DTV Consortium. However, these systems suffer from the converse problem, in that their form factors are not suited to the fact that most people do not want to watch TV at a PC, with its lean-forward, up-close form factor. Furthermore, such devices cannot effectively receive protected cable or satellite programming. And here, as with conventional TVs, the use of a single system forces technical, economical, and usage constraints on the inherently complex, multi-tasking, man-machine behavior that is desired in a rich hypermedia browsing experience.
There has also been some recognition that PCs provide a way around the limited installed base of advanced STBs, but this is generally perceived only as a limited stopgap. So called Enhanced TV or Extended TV or “telewebbing” has emerged to exploit the fact that tens of millions of households have PCs in the same room as their TVs, and can surf related content on the Web while watching TV. Some broadcasters such as ABC and PBS have exploited this to offer Web content synchronized to a TV program, but it is the user who must coordinate the use of the PC with the TV, by finding the appropriate Web site. In spite of the fact that the installed base for such open hardware is some ten times that of ITV-capable set-top boxes, the ITV community generally views such “two-box” solutions as an unfortunate and awkward stopgap that may be desirably supplanted by advanced “one-box” systems whose wide deployment must be awaited. Some major reasons for this lack of acceptance are that this simplistic two-box model supports only very limited, pre-defined synchronization of the availability of TV and enhancement content that is built into a rigidly fixed two-box structure at the content source, and, even more importantly, that it completely fails to address any coordination of user activity at the two separate boxes.
Across all of this, the key elements that are lacking are provision of a broadly flexible, powerful, selective, and simple user interface paradigm for browsing hypermedia across multiple device sets, whether they are integrated or not, with related methods for user and/or authoring control of such a UI, and provision of an effective method for independent systems to coordinate browsing activities to enable such a user interface to be employed across multiple independent systems. Further lacking across all of these aspects is delivery of these services in a way that provides the user with a smoothly integrated experience in which interactions on the multiple systems are coupled or decoupled to the degree appropriate to the task of the moment.